Nokia expands MX Industrial Edge ecosystem

Nokia has expanded its Industry 4.0 digitalization enabler application ecosystem running on the newly launched Nokia MX Industrial Edge. Nokia partners will help address enterprise demands for Industry 4.0 capabilities and use cases. MX Industrial Edge customers will be able to deploy an array of Nokia and third-party applications to advance their digital transformation.

Enterprises will have access to cloud and Industrial ISV applications that will unlock the real value of their operational data. Leveraging secure, resilient industrial IoT capabilities they will be able to apply real-time analytics and artificial intelligence to transform processes, automate workflows and enable use-cases such as digital twinning for new agility and sustainability. Enterprise customers of the Nokia MX Industrial Edge will be able to click and deploy applications from the application catalog.

To enable digitalization, disparate industrial systems connected to the network must be able to communicate between them and to the north-bound system such as digital twin, MES (Manufacturing Execution System), predictive maintenance analytics, etc. This is enabled using software plugins to the industrial device or edge. PTC’s Kepware® and Linux Foundation’s Fledge industrial connectivity solutions support multiple industrial data protocols and formats to simplify the process of accessing and aggregating data from those systems. Cherrie Gartner, Senior Vice President Go-to-Market Strategy and Global Head of Strategic Alliances at PTC said: "Enterprises are deriving tangible value from IIoT Solutions enabled by the Empowered Edge. PTC and Nokia partnerning at both a GTM and solution level, as is the case with the MX Industrial Edge, ThingWorx® and Kepware, serves to enable our customers to accelerate time to value".

Smart Mobile Labs Edge Video Orchestrator (EVO) technology ensures that multiple video streams from any source are delivered with as little as 1 millisecond latency allowing video streams for mission critical use cases to be delivered in real-time. Rüdiger Hnyk, CPO and Board member of the Smart Mobile Labs AG, said: “Evo is the perfect application for making 5G advantages visible and we appreciate to be hosted on the MXIE which makes it easy for our customers to experience real time video”.

In line with a previously announced collaboration, Nokia will offer Microsoft Azure IoT Edge Services allowing industries such as digital factories, smart cities, warehouses, and transportation hubs to realize new capabilities at the edge. Nokia continues to create connectors towards other web scale partners.

New mixed reality capabilities for training, maintenance and operations that remove location barriers are provided by Taqtile. Combined with MX Industrial Edge and XR capable devices such as AR headsets and tablets, Taqtile’s Manifest platform enriches the user experience by providing real-time instruction, collaboration tools and training materials that change the way information is delivered to deskless workers. This is particularly important for zero-fault production industries enabling users to work together with experts around the world to swiftly solve issues. Dirck Schou, Taqtile Chief Executive Officer, said: "MXIE helps Taqtile achieve its mission to bring Manifest anywhere a deskless worker performs work. Airfields, factories and hospitals are just some of the most difficult places we can access now.”

By integrating these capabilities within high performance networks and using technologies such as 4.9G/LTE and 5G private wireless networks, enterprises will benefit from the pervasive connectivity of myriad industrial connected devices, systems and sensors. The on-premise Nokia MX Industrial Edge means data is processed on-site, providing the highest compute and networking performance as well as the resilience and data security required by mission-critical Industry 4.0 use-cases.

Tuuli Ahava, Director Enterprise Solutions Application Program at Nokia, said: “At the end of last year we began onboarding industrial partner applications on the application catalog. Today, with our MX Industrial Edge ecosystem neutral approach, we are on an even more ambitious journey of partner expansion that allows our enterprise customers to tap into best-in-class partner digitalization enablers. Third-party developers benefit from Nokia management and orchestration capabilities so applications can be quickly deployed on MX Industrial Edge and offered to customer. We will continue to expand our industrial partner application offering and build further industrial and webscale connectors”.